MUSIC-USA: Tenor Sax of Joe Henderson Re-tells ‘Porgy and Bess’

By Farhan Haq Reprint | | Print |

NEW YORK, Feb 3 1998 (IPS) - It is one of the jazz world’s greatest ironies that a musical by George and Ira Gershwin that focuses on adultery, rape, murder and drug-dealing in a Southern black community has given birth to several lively jazz interpretations.

The Gershwin musical ‘Porgy and Bess’ in fact startles today’s audiences with its focus on the love of the poor cripple Porgy for the doomed Bess – whose lover Porgy kills, only to lose Bess to drugs and the lure of faraway New York City.

The denizens of the musical’s Catfish Row, created by Dubose and Dorothy Heyward, who wrote the ‘book’ for the production, are themselves a smattering of unflattering stereotypes, from the drug- dealing Sportin’ Life to the murderous Crown. Most of the cast, in any case, die or depart after a variety of disasters.

For all that, ‘Porgy and Bess’ repeatedly has inspired jazz musicians to re-create George Gershwin’s music in inventive new settings.

In 1958, trumpeter Miles Davis and arranger Gil Evans joined forces to reconfigure the score as a moody, orchestral suite which for many critics represented a peak of the jazz-classical ‘Third Stream’ movement. Louis Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald also took on the musical’s standards, with Armstrong devilishly capturing Sportin’ Life’s menace with his trumpeting and growling vocals on songs like ‘There’s a Boat Dat’s Leavin’ Soon for New York’.

The latest musician and arranger to look to ‘Porgy and Bess’ for inspiration is tenor saxophonist Joe Henderson. In recent years he has won several Grammy Awards and large audiences for his tributes to Miles Davis, Billy Strayhorn and other jazz legends.

Henderson’s new ‘Porgy and Bess’ (on Verve Records) offers 10 highlights from the musical, smoothly played by a band featuring pianist Tommy Flanagan, guitarist John Scofield and other mainstays. The interesting thing about the album is that, after so many previous interpretations, Henderson’s band offers a relatively straight, if lushly romantic, reading of the score.

The saxophonist himself takes on many of Gershwin’s wistful melodies, underscoring their melancholy strains with gentle, quavering notes. The other band members also contribute to the slightly eerie mood with deceptively spare playing, particularly from Scofield’s ominous electric guitar and Stefon Harris’s quiet, cool vibraphone.

On songs like ‘I Got Plenty o’ Nuttin’ and ‘Bess, You Is My Woman’ (even the titles strike a jarring note in modern times), the band plays quick ‘hard-bop’ choruses before joining in slow, consistently melodic improvisations that demonstrate why jazz artists love Gershwin: his musicality.

Just as Gershwin’s standard ‘I Got Rhythm’ gave birth to a whole series of jazz improvisations in the swing era, modern artists continue to explore his inventive chord changes and his own unique approach, in ‘Porgy and Bess’, to the rich African- American blues tradition.

The key difference between Henderson’s ‘Porgy and Bess’ and the Davis-Evans collaboration is that the 1958 album combined blues motifs, especially in Davis’s playing, with austere, semi- classical backing, while Henderson pushes the blues to the fore. And the new version also includes another treat: vocal renditions by pop stars Chaka Khan and Sting of two of the musical’s show- stoppers, ‘Summertime’ and ‘It Ain’t Necessarily So’.

Henderson has already attracted some criticism for the vocal numbers: in recent years, jazz and pop music have grown so far apart in jazz purists’ eyes that any crossover work with pop vocalists is frowned upon. But the songs are both quite good, with Khan’s aching vocals foreshadowing the menace in the otherwise sweet ‘Summertime’: “Summertime, and the livin’ is easy/ Catfish is jumpin’, and the cotton is high/ Your daddy’s rich, and you’re momma’s good-lookin’/ So hush, little baby, don’t you cry…”

Even more incredibly, Sting – whose previous ventures into the jazz world have repeatedly been scorned by purists like trumpeter Wynton Marsalis – acquits himself admirably singing Sportin’ Life’s cynical ‘It Ain’t Necessarily So’. Sting’s efforts to sing the heavily stylised African-American dialect of the musical could have been embarrassing, but his sly reading of lines like ‘The things you are liable/ To read in the Bible/ It ain’t necessarily so’ complement Henderson’s witty playing effectively.

The only puzzling thing about the album is what it suggests about the marketing of modern jazz. Joe Henderson, one of the premier hard-bop saxophonists, has in recent years made albums that look less like a collection of songs than like projects: tributes to Miles, Strayhorn, and Antonio Carlos Jobim, a big band venture, and now ‘Porgy and Bess’.

The tributes have certainly revitalised Henderson’s career, but they also leave listeners expectant for the saxophonist to release jazz albums without any overarching themes. In the modern jazz marketplace, however, albums of new music are becoming a rarity.

MUSIC-USA: Tenor Sax of Joe Henderson Re-tells ‘Porgy and Bess’

By Farhan Haq Reprint | | Print |

NEW YORK, Feb 3 1998 (IPS) - It is one of the jazz world’s greatest ironies that a musical by George and Ira Gershwin that focuses on adultery, rape, murder and drug-dealing in a Southern black community has given birth to several lively jazz interpretations.
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